Users of electronic computing devices—such as laptop computers, tablets, smart phones, and desktop computer—are increasingly using these devices to stream content over networks, such as the Internet. Media streaming is a form of content delivery in which a computing device—frequently referred to as a “client device”—requests media content from a content provider and displays the content to an end user while simultaneously obtaining additional content from the content provider. By streaming content, the client device enables the user to begin experiencing the content before the client device has received all of the content from the content provider. In an example, a user's smart phone may connect to a website via a browser application, request video content hosted on the website, and begin presenting the video to the end user while additional portions of the video are received from the website.
Content providers often attempt to determine the number of client devices that have accessed their media in order to estimate the relative success or popularity of their hosted content. For example, a content provider of a video may count the number of client devices that have requests segments of the video in order to estimate how many users have consumed the video.